1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a connection setting technique of configuring settings for connection with an external network.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, mobile communication networks accessible to the Internet have been provided by various carriers (mobile network operators). Connection of a data communication card to an electronic device, for example, a personal computer, allows the user anywhere to have access to an external network, such as the Internet. For the first use of a data communication card, it is required to configure network connection settings suitable for a corresponding carrier. Such network connection settings are not restricted to the first use of a data communication card but are also required at the time of changing over the effective communication medium between a fixed line and the data communication card and at the time of changing over the effective communication medium among multiple data communication cards.
Series of processing required for the network connection settings is, however, rather time- and labor-consuming for the user and has difficulties especially for unskilled users. Various techniques have accordingly been proposed to assist the user in configuring the network connection settings. For example, a method disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-060590 causes a table of correlating each model of a cell-phone to a type of a mobile communication network and network setting information to be stored in an electronic device. The method assumes a model of a connected cell-phone and issues an AT command corresponding to the assumed model. When there is a response to the issued AT command, the method utilizes information included in the response to identify the model of the cell-phone, subsequently refers to the table to identify the type of the mobile communication network, and configures network settings based on the identified model of the cell-phone and the identified mobile communication network. When there is no response to the issued AT command, on the other hand, the method repeats this series of processing with changing a model to be assumed, until the model of the cell-phone is identified. This proposed method, however, requires rather complicated series of processing to configure the network connection settings. Simplification of the required processing is thus demanded.